Books I have not read
Is a thought squatting
At the back of my brain
Looking a lot like a
Laughing bedside table
Overflowing with falling
And jumbled and stacked
And continually shuffled
But never finished
Books

I have not read many books
In fact almost none
If we’re talking statistics
I mean think of all the books
There are in the world
Even only the good ones
And all the words upon words
Their pages contain

I’m a slow reader

But what are numbers really
I mean compare the soul
To a graph or an equation
Or just a number
My soul is a four
Your’s is a six
What could that possibly mean?

I try not to think about it

We sent astronauts
To the moon
They were test pilots
Technical men
Men of action
Men of numbers
But don’t you wish
They had been poets?

But poets don’t always return
And neither do test pilots
And the list of books
That I have not read
Continues to grow
Like the expanding Universe
Booming and crackling
Into something even a poet
Might hesitate to say
She adequately or even
Apophatically described

And to think all this
And by “all this” I include
The books I have not read
Began only a few billion years ago
With a Word